


The Only Living Boy in New York

by jackmarlowe



Series: Somebody's Sins [1]
Category: The Godfather (1972 1974 1990)
Genre: 1930s, Adopted Sibling Relationship, Gen, Homophobic Language, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Misgendering, Period-Typical Homophobia, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-08
Updated: 2016-06-08
Packaged: 2018-07-12 19:19:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7119229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jackmarlowe/pseuds/jackmarlowe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Of all people to find him drunk in a 42nd Street nightclub, Tom Hagen was not counting on a Corleone. </p><p>Set in 1937.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Only Living Boy in New York

**Author's Note:**

> This is part of the slowly-unravelling-my-life-rewrite saga where Michael is trans. You should see my main/longer instalment The Obvious Child for a cleverer disclaimer about that, but basically I want to write about historical trans people and especially this family and that's involved a lot of making shit up as I go along with some educated research guesses. This particular bit is set in 1937, before Michael begins his medical transition and with Tom knee-deep in his own internalised homophobia, so features (unintentional) misgendering, period-specific talk about/understandings of gender non-conforming, trans, and gay people, and homophobic slurs. Balancing historical context with respectful non-gratuitous portrayals is an ongoing #struggle here, but it's important to me and I'm trying - if you're LGBTQ and have specific comments or questions about any of that, please share.
> 
> If you too want to stuff more tiny facts about mid-century gay New York into once-useful parts of your brain, the nightclub in this is based on The Barrel House, a real-life 1930s gay club off Times Square.

It’s the third time he’s been called a faggot but the first time it’s dragged weary and hard between his shoulder blades, stuck to the fabric of his shirt in the muggy Midtown nighttime. They are three kids walking back from the porno movies on Forty-Fourth and they get run off laughing quick by the men spilling out onto the sidewalk, but Tom, sat on the curb edge with his feet drunk in the gutter and a crumpled cigarette hanging limp from his hand, finds he’s lost his voice. The denial that springs stumbling and instinctive to his lips fades and someone grips the back of his neck friendly and brief, tells him not to worry about it.

Forget about it. He’s got it thrumming in his head even against the band crashing their way through Duke Ellington, the bodies tight and stifling underneath the street, walls occupied by the smokers with their sharp hot eyes and the couples undoing ties and slipping hands beneath summer jackets, between buttons. They switch off the lights every hour to save on the electric bill — complaints and whoops but it’s only a Thursday — and the oppressive heat of the big stage spots. In the dark, Tom feels the slide of fingertips up the inside of his thigh and when the lights come back on he stands blinking in the flashing half-dark, panting the overwhelming familiar stench of sweat and stale beer through his bone-dry lips. A few faces turn inviting grins towards him and he doesn’t look back at anyone in particular.

He has another drink and another and ends up, inevitably, on his knees in a bathroom stall with no door and glass ground into the shit-stained tiles. Vaguely behind him he can hear the drag queen act starting up — _besame mucho_ , drawled so low she makes the audience howl and drowns out the gasps immediately above him. The hands gripping his hair belong to a man who must be at least forty, not a regular but a Wall Street man by his suit and watch. He’s so obvious he’s embarrassing here, a clear mistake even with Tom near-gagging on his cock and scrabbling mindless for his ass: Tom, delirious with the force of his intent, eyes closed, feels the alcohol rise dangerous in his stomach and brings himself back imagining how much this man makes in a year. The number is reassuring and real, enough that he actually licks his lips after the guy comes with a heave and a shout that makes next-door’s regulars pause to bang irritable on their cubicle. _Get a god damn room, some of us’re tryin-a fuck in here._

It’s when he tries to stand up he realises: shit. Faggot Tom Hagen in the middle of this Midtown faggot club with the knees of his pants too filthy and his legs too uncertain to stumble back anywhere clean and respectable. He realises this again leaning hard against the telephone booth in the back hallway, trying to ignore the Mexican boys getting off by the emergency exit and failing to dial the operator, finger jammed and unwilling to spin for the only number that stays in his head by this point. ‘Oh, Sonny,’ he forces out through his lips, mumbling a pretend rehearsal. ‘Oh, Ma-’

‘You need a taxi, baby?’

Granada is standing close behind, wrists to gold-sequin hips, a full head taller in her heels and her drawn-on eyebrows raised between scathing and amused. She’s slightly sweaty from the stage but her dark foundation has yet to budge — Tom, who’s never seen her from more than five jostling rows back before, leans and stares mouth half-open.

She clicks her tongue disapproving; the band’s abruptly back on in the dark, drawing screams that briefly sound so like a raid even Tom shifts on his rolling feet. Granada glances to the Mexicans jammed in their corner and snaps rapid Spanish at them, hisses when she’s soundly ignored. Tom slurs stupid back in what sounds closest: ‘ _No._ _Grazie mille_.’

‘You talking wop?’ Her teeth flash brilliant and incredulous. ‘Oh, baby — pretty blond sonuvabitch like you? Okay, we got—’ She turns halfway down the hallway, projecting a bass boom that cuts over the deafening snare drum ‘—Johnny! You let my babies in? Is Mike here? I need an Italian boy.’ Tom grips the sides of the phone booth as she reaches over and replaces the grimy receiver for him, the blast of her perfume briefly searing enough sense into him to stand him upright. ‘We got somebody who speaks that,’ she says cheerfully, and wipes something off his cheek with a manicured finger. ‘Tony up front, or my friend Michael. You’ll like Tony better, you trust me. Maybe you already did tonight, huh!’

Slate-grey nighttime light flashes through the side of his vision as the exit door swings and bangs. Tom leans and lets himself be led, to stand or lean or sit, in the little dressing room with its soft red lights and all the brick banging sound of the club muffled to a steady thump-thump of the bass drum. There is water in his hand and Granada with her dress off, briefly like all the boys who Tom sees putting on eye makeup in the bathroom before things get started, before she wraps a silk dressing gown around her and softens into something familiar again. She smiles at him and he loses her briefly in a sudden dizzy spell; when the focus in his vision returns, she’s talking to people at the door, husky voices and another one of the acts.

‘They didn’t let Annie in, huh? Those motherfuckers-’ ‘She’s gonna meet us back at the apartment. The girls went out on their own- ‘-and I wasn’t invited? Lord!’ ‘You want Mikey to talk to this poor immigrant you trapped?’ ‘Yeah, honey.’ The door swings back and clicks shut again. ‘It ain’t Tony, baby,’ Granada says, sing-song. ‘So sorry!’

It’s his sister, dark-eyed and pale in the dim light with her hair done as elaborate and slick as he’s ever seen it. She stands stock-still and stares, hands frozen halfway out of her pants pockets, spine gone so sudden-rigid the other butch girl with her is instantly drawn around. ‘You okay, Mike?’ she says, loud and unmistakably Brooklyn Irish.

‘How’d you get in here?’ Lou asks quietly.

‘You know this kid?’ Granada looms behind the butches; still in her heels, face instantly set. Her cheeks have gone taut and her jaw like stone. Tom has never spoken to a drag queen before tonight but understands instinctively through his haze what he’s heard other men say.

He takes a breath and slops water over his hand trying to find the floor to set down his glass. The Irish butch snorts but stays firm and wary. Tom keeps his eyes on his sister and wills his tongue into something that does not slur, stumbles into Sicilian as the imposed default. ‘You’re not — _non si può ess’re – qui. Lucia_.’

‘I came to see Granada’s show,’ she says flatly, staying in English. ‘They don’t check IDs.’

He slips mumbling and helpless and lame back into the same language, his own accent awkward on his tongue – something about no girls allowed, to which Granada laughs nasty and the other butch spits. Lou is smaller and slighter than her friend but fits into her suit better – dark grey, broad lapels, narrow angles, sharp and heavy-lidded under black raked-back hair. Tom can see, vaguely, how they might think to let her in even without someone on the inside. He recognises the red tie Fredo wore on his sixteenth birthday and nearly retches at the suddenness of home, here, worn around his sibling’s neck with the blunt casual assuredness of New York anonymity. Lou blinks and steps to his side, kneeling to touch his forehead with the back of one hand uncertainly as if checking for a fever.

‘Who is this bastard?’ the Irish one demands.

‘Her brother,’ Tom manages. ‘And – we’re going. Home.’

‘No taxi gonna pick you up like this,’ Granada says matter-of-factly. ‘This really your _brother_ , Michael boy?’

‘Yeah.’ Lou sits back on her haunches and looks at him. _Chefai?  
_

‘Well. The resemblance is un-fucking-canny.’

‘He’s my brother,’ she repeats, sharp enough Tom blinks and puts his hand on her shoulder to steady himself. His little sister. He can’t remember the last time he’s seen her out on her own. ‘Mary, help me – we need to get him home.’

‘Your mama know about this?’ Granada asks lowly. ‘Hell, did _you_ know he was queer? This ain’t the first time I seen him around.’

‘I mean home to the goddamn apartment. Mar’, come _on_ -’

They practically carry him home. Tom’s shoes are still new, first-day-of-law-school creaky, and scuff something bad on the pavement as he stumbles between the girls in their suits, Granada behind in a fox fur coat despite the heat. In their strange procession the word is inescapable once they leave the busy familiar six-block radius – _fucking faggots_ – and Tom between his fresh-air wave of nausea and the sour mossy taste of stockbroker cum still in his mouth wants to take Lou’s hand and walk them away, or knock someone down, though the wild impulse towards violence has never been his to keep in the family. Not for the first time, he wants the assurance behind Sonny’s fists: to kill as a Corleone is easier, possible, sanctioned by God. The thought makes him pant as he tries to shift his weight to Mary’s broad shoulder and keep his feet. Lou’s never seen him this drunk and he knows it and hates every fucking new-shoed step as they pass another yelling boy and she stays silent with the horrible ease of someone who’s heard it more than him.

The apartment is like something out of Clemenza’s war stories – bare mattresses on the floor, windows open wide to let the lack of air out, no electricity – and belongs to someone else, a detail he misses between the toilet and the floor. When he opens his eyes Granada is handing Lou a wet rag and murmuring something to her, and Lou is knelt beside him undoing his tie in deft, practiced tugs, her hair coming out of his hold and framing her face like Connie’s, the first two buttons of her shirt and her own tie undone.

‘You – gonna give that back?’ he whispers, tugging at the end of it.

‘No. Fredo hates it anyway. He tried to throw it out when Ma wasn’t looking.'

Tom tries to smile. Lou pulls a musty-smelling blanket over his waist and watches him, solemn and close-lipped, one hand coming up strangely timid to touch his chest. ‘You shoulda told me,’ she murmurs, slipping unconscious into the older butch’s Brooklyn tough brogue without raising her voice. ‘We could – hitch a ride together, or something. Pop would let me come into the city more if I was with you.’

‘It’s not like that.’

She squares her shoulders and leans furious and quiet over him, staring intense in the dark. ‘Tom. For Christ’s sake, I just _want_ -’

‘ _Mike_ ,’ he drawls in the same voice. His sister leans back out of his range of focus and pauses, blurred around the edges, her face impossible to make out. Without this cue, sleep roars up towards Tom and tugs hungry at his elbows. He snaps his jaw in a yawn and squints, adding impulsively: ‘Is that right?’

‘Get some sleep, okay?' Her voice is small and distant and the taste in his mouth has faded to nothing. 'I'll be right here.'

* * *

He wakes to an already-worn anvil in his head. Someone is stepping careful over his mattress; water groans and runs like a tired old man yawning two floors above.  
  
Before he opens his eyes he's grounded in Manhattan by the growling rushing new-day cacophony of taxi horns particular to this city. Tom is a New Yorker by birth and raising and probably always will be, but he hasn't actually lived in the city since he was a child – the noises of an apartment block either knock him out of time or remind him he's just visiting. It's just gone light, yellowing the peeled lead paint washed sloppily up these tenement walls.  
  
Someone snores softly behind the ragged curtain leading to the next room. When Tom lifts his head, he sees his sister at the stove in a man's undershirt and last night's trousers. Someone laughs too loud outside the door and Lou – Michael, he remembers, and for the first time really wonders at this – swears softly under her breath in her own natural treble.  
  
Tom tries sitting up slow. This turns out to be a hell of a medical experiment: his hips shriek and creak like an old person's and he has to chuff a steadying breath to his chest to see straight. The worst, he senses, will come in a few hours when his body realises it's still got alcohol trapped in its joints and pores. God knows what's between his teeth.  
  
Lou turns her head at the noise and gives him a little hopeful half-smile, loping over with two cups of black coffee skimmed with floating grainy bits that accompany every attempt to get grown-up coffee right. She nods to the big window and he crawls with some difficulty over to join her on the stained spare mattress there, squinting in the already-warm morning sun with his mug propped against the heel of his bare foot. Lou's hair has come free of its careful harsh-angled back-comb into the weird messy spikes peculiar to Pop's genes but she looks more whole and at ease than him this morning, closing her eyes and tipping her head back for a breath of the sunshine glittering off the skyscrapers. Tom lets the silence sit oddly comfortable between them and watches her: seventeen and not quite grown into her odd little bantamweight fighter's build, sitting wearing her oldest brother's messiness and the expansive purposeful slouch she can't get away with at the dinner table.

'Where's everyone else?' Tom asks. The first sip of coffee sits surprisingly heavy in his belly and steadies him, lets him copy her leaning back on his arms. They haven't been alone together in months, and even then never as adults – this feels a little like talking to Sonny in the room they shared for nine years.  
  
'Work.'  
  
'Is this that drag queen's place?'  
  
'No. Annie's. She's asleep.'

He tips his head to his shoulder to eye her calculatingly. 'She your girlfriend?'  
  
Lou looks back and raises dark eyebrows, the tip of her tongue pressing against her lip. 'Annie's _forty_. I don't have one.'  
  
Tom shrugs and ploughs on like he doesn't mind being careless about it. 'Well. I wouldn't worry about it. Handsome – kid, like you-'  
  
'I thought you'd think I was too young,' she snorts, rolling her cup between her palms and glancing down into her coffee. 'You said so last night.'  
  
'What – too young for the club? You're too young to be drinking, yeah. Ma would line me up for the firing squad.' He pauses and makes a little awkward halfway gesture between his hands. 'But you want a girlfriend, right?'  
  
Lou tugs at the tips of her socks and inhales through her nose, sucking in her lower lip careful and halfway wry. 'Tommy,' she says quiet. 'You don't need to give me some kind of talk, you know? I know how you are, but – I was older than you in there, right?'

'I'm not _dumb_ , Lou-'

'Does everybody else know?'

'About me?'

'About _me_.'

'Everyone talks, don't they? You hear it all from Ma.' Sonny knows; he doesn't understand entirely but Tom has tried to explain, a little. It's easier to articulate it about someone else, even family.  
  
'Just promise me you won't tell Pop, okay?'  
  
Tom scoffs and puts his mug down, suddenly irritated - he's glad she's not holding last night's everything against him but this no-nonsense matter-of-factness is abrupt and grating, like something their uncle Tessio might do to wrap up a conversation that shouldn't be had with the littlest cousins in the room. 'Sure - I'd get to tell him how I know what a butch is, and why you ain't just dressing like that to get on Ma's nerves. That's a conversation I'm just dying not to take to the fucking grave.'  
  
She glares at him and glances quick back to her feet. They sit, Tom finding his way into a tense cross-leg, and the first ice cream truck of the morning warbles its lazy bell up ten flights to drift through the window.  
  
Her hands remain on her too-big black socks, pulling the toes away and tugging back compulsively for what's not quite a fit. 'My friends are calling me Michael.'  
  
'I heard.' Tom sucks at his coffee. 'Not Italian. Never thought I'd catch you taking after my side of the family.'  
  
'I kind of like it.' She pushes a hand through her hair, half-consciously feeling for last night's arrangement. 'And it is, too, it's Biblical. Michele.'  
  
'You gonna take that home to Ma and Pop and everybody, huh?'  
  
'I was saying you could use it if you wanted.'  
  
'I'm not-' Tom takes a breath and smiles into his coffee, shaking his head a little. 'Look, champ. I'm not one of your Brooklyn butches. We're not gonna be driving into the city together on the weekends, okay?'

She looks at him, even and steady though her brows are drawn. 'Why not? Don't tell me it's not _like that_.'

The coffee has begun to percolate again in his gut. Though the half-burnt taste has blasted out the inside of his mouth, he can feel tiny grains of coffee on his tongue that make his mouth feel hungover, though he guesses he's still probably a little drunk. Tom sighs and raises his hands. 'Because it's my business and you're my little sister. And Jesus, I can't even give you advice about finding a goddamn girlfriend. You know what it's like, sure, better than me - why do I gotta spell it out for you, then?'

 _Like that_ , when what it is or isn't is decided and left aside in some hot fumbling moments that factor nothing into a law school lecture hall or their kitchen table - easy, but for this Corleone so obvious, obvious in their family in the way he might be obvious and isn't. He remembers the first time he saw her slip on one of Fredo's blazers, wide-eyed in the mirror with the sleeves nearly to her knees, hands briefly forgetting how to roll back to do up a button. His little sister, sweet and thoughtful and unnatural with Sonny laughing and showing her how to make a hard fist like a boy. It made him, not thirteen, hot with rage and strangeness he couldn't shake for days.

'You owe me,' she points out, mild with a Sicilian shrug that makes her briefly and eerily like Pop. 'Technically speaking.'

Tom pauses, reaches out and tugs a little at the shoulder of her undershirt; Lou's eyes widen but she doesn't move. 'You got a plan for all this, _ragazzo?_ ' he asks gently.

'Do you?'

They look at one another. Lou quirks a smile and cups his jaw, brief and gentle and grown-up - forget about it.

'You're my brother,' she reminds him again, drawing her feet under her to get up with the empty mugs stained with coffee grounds. Like a fond incantation echoing his choice of the masculine endearment, or what passes easy between strangers on the street who look like them. You're mine too, he tries out in his head, and lets his too-heavy tongue stay silent and wonder.


End file.
